A History of Canadian Catholics: Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism (review)

Abstract

Canadian A History of Canadian Catholics: Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism. By Terence J. Fay. [McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion, Series Two.] (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 400. $75.00 clothbound; $27.95 paperback.) Terence Fay admits that a major hope in writing his book is to create the first comprehensive history of Catholics in (p. ix). Though there are other works dealing with the history of Canadian Catholicism and Christianity, Father Fay claims to address his objective by focusing on French and Englishspeaking Canadian Catholics as well as Native people and Euro-Canadians from first contact to the present. Even so, given its very brief coverage of Canada's west and far west, especially since it claims to be comprehensive, the book continues to reflect a perennial problem of Canadian Catholic church historiography of largely ignoring Canadian Catholicism west of Ontario. Surely, given the ever-increasing number of published monographs and articles on church history in Canada's west and far west, such a situation is no longer justified. As for the book's subtitle, it reflects its threefold chronological division from a state-controlled Francophone Catholicism, to a Vatican- or ultramontane-dominated Catholicism and finally and especially since Vatican Council II (19621965), to a Catholicism that is still struggling to even comprehend, much less accept the pluralistic, globalized, multicultural, and interfaith reality of modern Canada, or, in short, that Canada is now no longer a Christian nation. In trying to achieve his very worthy objective, Fay deliberately follows a strictly narrative rather than a narrative-analytical approach. In a word we are provided with safe history. Fay does this by stressing the importance of many figures, both clerical and lay, men and women, though mainly clerical-episcopal; and by covering significant social and political policies that have influenced cultural, ethnic, and gender development over four centuries. Again this is achieved by taking the safe road by not seriously challenging any past shadows in Canadian Catholicism (e.g., J. R. Miller, certainly a major and generally accepted authority on Native residential schools, makes no appearance, except for an article on anti-Catholicism; though Joanna Manning, a strong critic of the Catholic Church's treatment of women, is noted briefly [pp. 316-317], but without Fay taking any position short of admitting that, since they are over half the Canadian population, women are important). …